anonymous - toward the destruction of schooling(the anarchist library)

8/15/2019 Anonymous - Toward the Destruction of Schooling(the Anarchist Library)

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Anonymous

Toward the Destruction of

Schooling

The Anarchist Library



Contents

1 The Role of Schooling in Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 The History of Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3 Theories of Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

4 Notes on the Poverty of Student Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

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Chapter 1

The Role of Schooling in

Society

“When examined, answer with questions” — Graffiti Paris, 1968

Most people don’t like being told what to do. Any institution that aimsto structure and regiment a person’s life is, to a certain extent, in conflictwith that person. The interesting thing is that that person is not always inwillful conflict with the institution. Those who are obedient and fulfill their roleas students understandably try to ignore the negative effects their schoolingis having on them. But who would honestly deny that these effects are quitevisible? Students are taught, through the process of schooling, to be conformist,

unimaginative, docile, and a great many other things that are by and largeconsidered virtues in the working world. Stay this way and you may never feelgood about yourself, but you will be congratulated by authority figures for therest of your life. I think that the antagonistic feelings that people have towardschool reflect what schools are trying to do to you. Our present situation inwhich compulsory schooling appears to be so natural has a historical context;the forces at work and reasons why we spend so much of our lives in schoolcan only be adequately explained from a perspective that looks at schoolinghistorically in terms of the means employed and the ends desired and looksat where these institutional designs leave the individual caught up in school.Such a perspective can be revolutionary only if it identifies with the individualcaught up in school — with their needs and desires, their anger and frustration.We must look at how schooling fits into the whole of society and what sort of

social relationships and institutions are hinged upon keeping this individual —you, for all practical purposes — acquiescent. The problem, namely, that mostpeople do in fact do what they are told, is a problem with the totality civilizedsocial relations.

Schooling is a fundamental process of our society. It can be understood as theensemble of techniques by which a society instructs the young in the knowledge,values, and attitudes necessary for becoming responsible members of society,reproducing the dominant social order. The bells, the classes, the rules, thediscipline — all are important aspects of a controlling process aimed at moldingthe individual into a form more desirable to others — to authorities. Schooling,like work, is based on coercion. Generally speaking, one does not do schoolwork

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because the experience itself is rewarding. One does not do schoolwork on one’s

own terms. Also, there is a carrot or a stick guiding your progress — usuallyboth. Max Stirner had it right when he said that “the school question is a lifequestion.”1

The most important life-skill taught in schools is subservience. It is abso-lutely essential to all hierarchical social systems. Education, as William TorreyHarris (U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century) once de-fined it, is “the subsumption of the individual.”2 Nobody is absolutely free of social pressures, material forces, outside influences. But it does not follow thatwe should submit to the ideal of the individual’s “adjustment” to the socialterrain: behavior modification administered by the guardians of the Republic.There is an essential tension here: the tension between unique individuals andthe social institutions that prevent their self-determination.

The necessity of schools is deeply ingrained in the modern psyche. Implicit

in the acceptance of any modern political ideology is the assumption that theindividual exists to serve the common good or some higher principle exterior topersonal subjectivity — in fact, this seems to be the basis of all ideology, allpolitical systems, all forms of rule. So, proceeding from this assumption, thesufficiently schooled person — the university student, for example — assumesthe thinking of a social planner with regard to all political questions. Criticalthinking is so discouraged that many are virtually incapable of taking an anti-political stance against all the moral baggage of formal ideology, against thetotality of “mental production”.3 Alexander Inglis had the following to sayabout this aspect of schooling: “It must be recognized that in American societyeach individual must be not merely a law-abiding citizen but also to some extenta law-making citizen.”4 In a democratic state, social stability rests principally

on the internalization of the values behind the rules, the morality behind itsreification in law. One can dislike school and still believe in its mythology —most people do. The stereotypes of good students, bad students and everyother category of student conceal the question of the desirability of systems of grading and categorization. “Banalities, due to what they conceal, work for thedominant organization of life . . . words will not cease to work until people do,”wrote Mustapha Khayati.5 The mythology of this dominant organization of life

1Max Stirner, “The False Principle of Our Education,” http://www.nonserviam.com/

egoistarchive/stirner/articles/false.html. This article was originally published by Marxin the Rheinische Zeitung . After Stirner wrote his masterwork The Ego and Its Own (an ex-cellent book), Marx was so infuriated by it that he devoted a large (most of the book) andlargely irrelevant portion of The German Ideology to a critique of Stirner’s ideas.

2John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 2002), 61–62.

3“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is theruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class whichhas the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production areon the whole subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of thedominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of therelations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.” KarlMarx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 1998),67.

4Alexander Inglis, Principles of Secondary Education (Cambridge, Massachusetts: River-side Press, 1918), 343.

5Ken Knabb ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of PublicSecrets, 1995), 170–175. The Situationist International (1957–1972) was a relatively small

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consists of myths such as the necessity of being schooled in order to learn, the

detached objectivity (and intelligence!) of the intellectual, and many others, allreflecting capitalist values — the most salient of which is Progress.The student, like society, is continually making progress. The student’s

progress, like that of society, is fundamentally a domestication of the humananimal. When Derrick Jensen asked himself why schooling takes so long, theanswer he came up with was straightforward and truthful: “It takes that longto sufficiently break a child’s will. It is not easy to disconnect children’s wills,to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation forthe lives of painful employment they will have to endure.”6 A few centuriesearlier, Immanuel Kant put it more succinctly: “Man must be disciplined be-cause he is naturally wild. . . ”7 Discipline is at the heart of the educationalenterprise. Schools are obviously not organized by the students — they are thepopulation that is to be controlled, monitored, measured, and disciplined. Dis-

cipline is “what the factory and the office and the store share with the prisonand the school and the mental hospital.”8 There are certain rules to be fol-lowed and the student is watched at all times to make sure she is conforming.Discipline is essential, but it does not explain all aspects of schooling. Knowl-edge, the commodity that the school deposits in you or showers you with issomething exterior to the student, who accumulates knowledge in a process be-yond her control. Knowledge is power, most commonly to the extent that onecan serve the interests of power and secure a comfortable or powerful place inthe social order. Foucault pointed out that power necessarily produces knowl-edge: “. . . power and knowledge directly imply one another . . . there is no powerrelation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor anyknowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power re-

lations.”9

Highly specialized knowledge of the type that schools impart reflectscomplex power relations hinging on extensive hierarchy and division of labor.The increasing importance of schooling in modern society reflects society’s in-creasing totalitarianism, in the sense that more and more human activities aresubordinated to and conditioned by the advanced techniques of a technologicalsociety whose driving force is Capital.10

It is obvious that any critique of schooling must have within it a critique of the social order of which the schools are a part and vise versa. Schooling seemsto be a positive feedback system: more and more people go through schools,capitalism advances, and more schools are needed to keep people subservient to

yet influential Paris-based group that had its origins in the avant garde artistic tradition.The situationists are best known for their radical political theory and their influence on theMay 1968 student and worker revolts in France. The most important situationist books are

probably The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, The Revolution of Everyday Life byRaoul Vaniegem, and the anthology cited above.

6Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (White River Junction, VT: ChelseaGreen, 2000), 102. This book is possibly the most accessible and convincing critique of civilization.

7Immanuel Kant, The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (Philadelphia: LippincottCompany, 1904), 225.

8Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics,1986), 20. The theme of the essay “The Abolition of Work,” readily available on the internet,closely parallels the theme of this essay.

9Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage,1977), 27.

10Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964).

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the bosses. Education is such an important “right” for all people that it “shall be

compulsory” according to Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of HumanRights.11 Education seems to be something that all the ideologues can agreeon. It is obviously helping people to adapt to the insanity of modern society.We become automatons, docile bodies — boring, dumb, and monotonous fromdoing schoolwork with the same characteristics. By and large, students submitto their behavior modification and faithfully reproduce the current social order.

11http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

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Chapter 2

The History of Schooling

“It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very labo-rious thing to make Republicans. . . ” — Horace Mann

“The family and the tribe are the schools of savages,” wrote James Mulhern.1

It would be far more accurate to say that “savages” don’t have schools, but thatwould perhaps bring the whole idea of schools into question, or at least getthe reader to think about how tribes have been replaced by schools, familiesby classes. If modern schools are presented as simply more advanced forms of something that has always existed, they somehow seem more unavoidable, a partof our “human nature.” Schooling is necessary to a society to the extent thata given society constitutes a social order where individuals are subordinated tosome collectivity. Government and hierarchical social relations maintain “social

order” in civilized societies, and are therefore prerequisites for the developmentof schooling.

The development of writing systems in Sumeria and Egypt set the stage forthe first specialists in the modern sense: scribes. Writing evolved as a way of monitoring wealth, keeping track of the size of armies, and recording monetarytransactions — important functions of power for early cities.2 Scribes, or in-tellectuals, have always existed to serve the interests of power. Schooling wasoriginally intended for scribes and other functionaries who occupied administra-tive and priestly roles. The impersonal relationship of students to an authorityfigure who instructs them is thus historically very intimately tied to the func-tioning of power. Schools developed as adjuncts to the temple-courts of theruling castes of ancient cities. Accounting, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy,

and a significant amount of literature concerned with religious themes grew outof these first specialized intellectual environments. Along with all of these cul-tural pursuits, emphasis was always placed on morality and good manners —

1James Mulhern, A History of Education (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1959),52. This idea is echoed elsewhere: “In the most primitive cultures, there is often little formallearning, little of what one would ordinarily call school or teachers; for, frequently, the entireenvironment and all activities are school, and many or all adults are teachers. . . The concen-tration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culturethan they are able to do by merely observing and imitating.” “History of Education,” The Encyclopedia Britannica (1988 ed.), 11.

2Michael Cole, “Cognitive Development and Formal Schooling: The Evidence from Cross-Cultural Research,” The Evolution of Education ed. David Swanger (Orlando, Florida: Har-court Brace, 1995), 68.

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renunciation being at the root of the work ethic so essential to schooling .3 Ed-

ucation in the East shared these characteristics: Hindu schools stressed mentalpurity and self-discipline, which were religious as well as school virtues.4

It is with Greece that the Western tradition in education is said to begin.Greek education was originally concerned with the ideal of the noble warrior.Slowly this heroic culture became more of a scribe culture, although the writtenword was not to be the sole concern of education until all learning was organizedaround the Book of Books, the Christian bible. In Sparta, education had anessentially military character, its chief purpose being the training of the hoplites,or heavy infantry. Athenian education was never as strictly organized as thatof Sparta. Nonetheless, the ephebia of Athens were schools for future soldiersorganized by the state. The ephebia, however, eventually lost their militaryfocus, ceased to be compulsory, and began teaching philosophy and rhetoric tothe wealthy that would never have to work.5

Prior to the sixth century B.C., Greek education was generally “artisticrather than literary, athletic rather than intellectual.”6 Many Greek cities, es-pecially Athens, were developing a very active political life around this time.This more democratized Athens developed forms of collective education thatpaved the way for the development of the school as an institution. The Sophistsresponded to the need for a new ideal of education and began to teach studentswith the intention of molding successful citizens: people who were intellectual,scientific, and rational.7 If “man is the measure of all things,” as Protagorassaid, are sophists the best measurers?8 The Sophists went from town to townsearching for pupils, literally selling their skills — they became the first paidteachers. Their approach was looked upon contemptuously by many who saweducation as encompassing so much more than practical pursuits; nonetheless,

they laid the foundation for the more highly developed Hellenistic educationthat would consist of a complex course of studies undertaken from the age of seven to twenty. Although there were no infant schools in Greece, Plato feltthat children should go to school at six. Aristotle felt that five would be themost sensible age to begin, and Chrysippus was modern enough to say three.Schooling was beginning to assume great importance in the minds of influen-tial thinkers.9 Plato felt that with schooling, man becomes “the most divineand most civilized” of all animals; without it, “he is the most savage of earthlycreatures.”10 Still, for all his seriousness about preparing the next generationof political leaders, the academy he founded was incredibly informal by modernstandards.11

Roman education was originally very different from intellectual Hellenisticeducation. Whereas the Greek boy was led to school by a slave, a pedagogue,

3William A. Smith, Ancient Education (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 20–46;Everett Reimer, School is Dead (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1971), 56.

4Mulhern, 111.5H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956).6Ibid., 43.7Ibid., 39–47.8Ibid., 51.9Everett Reimer, School is Dead (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1971), 57; H.I. Marrou,

A History of Education in Antiquity .10Edward J. Power, A Legacy of Learning: A History of Western Education (Albany, New

York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 32.11Ibid., 30; Plato, The Republic . The Portable Plato (New York: Penguin, 1977).

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the Roman boy stayed at home and was raised by his mother and educated by

his father until he was old enough for military service. As Rome extended itsempire, Greek influence increased and eventually Roman schools were created forthe purpose of training administrators and state functionaries. Still, there wasnever any general scholastic policy as was to be developed later by the modernnation-state. Christianity developed in the midst of Greco-Roman civilization,and its educational practice would incorporate both Greek intellectualism andRoman severity, absorbing what is perhaps the most persistent theme of WesternEducation, the ideal image of man — man who bowed down before the law andsacrificed himself for an ideal.12

The first Christian schools were the catechetical schools of the first centuriesA.D., where instruction was exclusively oral. They were institutes of higherlearning in the sense that they were geared toward an older audience. Theywere principally concerned with instructing pagans in Christian beliefs so that

they could be baptized.13 The monastic school, originally created for futuremonks, appeared in the fourth century and they became the first genuine Chris-tian schools.14 Cathedral schools which were provided by every Cathedral werea later development, and the enrichment of their program helped bring aboutthe rise of the Universities during the medieval period.15 From the 11th cen-tury onward, the church was very much concerned with the development of aneffective educational system. At the same time, the characteristics of higher ed-ucation were being established between the 11th and 16th centuries.16 FrederickEby writes, “By the end of the 15th century, 79 universities were recognized inwestern Europe. Almost all had the blessings of the Pope, even if they did notowe their initiation to papal decree. . . Most of the students were laymen, andsecular subjects such as law, medicine, and the sciences dominated their inter-

est [more and more].”17

With the rise of Christianity, education came to have afundamentally moral aim. Discipline was becoming ever more precise as livingand learning became more and more conditioned by set parameters of space andtime.18

The 16th and 17th century grammar school that was physically separatedfrom the church was the product of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Thehumanism of the Renaissance stimulated a greater interest in intellectual activityand classical learning, while the reformation moved beyond the traditionalism

12Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity .13Power, 95–96; Mulhern, 258.14Power, 106.15Frederick Eby, The Development of Modern Education: Second Edition (Englewood Cliffs,

N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1952), 20; Mulhern, 279.16

“History of Education,” The Encyclopedia Britannica (1988 ed.), 34; “Higher Education,”The Encyclopedia Britannica (1988 ed.), 1. Also of note: “Between the eleventh and the four-teenth centuries, an attempt to reduce the influence of emotionality in religion took commandof church policy. Presenting the teachings of the Church in scientific form became the mainecclesiastical purpose of school, a tendency called scholasticism. This shift from emotion tointellect resulted in great skill in analysis, in comparison and contrasts, in classifications andabstraction, as well as famous verbal hairsplitting — like how many angels could dance on thehead of a pin. Scholasticism became the basis for future upper-class schooling.” John TaylorGatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling (New York: The Oxford Village Press, 2003), 15. This book,though hard to find, is possibly the most eye-opening book on the subject.

17Eby, 22–23.18Reimer, 58; Foucault, 150: “For centuries, the religious orders had been masters of disci-

pline: they were the specialists of time, the great technicians of rhythm and regular activities.”

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and formalism of medieval times. In terms of schooling, the two movements

seemed to work in harmony.

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Martin Luther, who was a staunch advocate of schooling, influenced the growth of lower schools throughout northern Europe.With Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, more and more Bibles were beingprinted, and universal education, if not a humanist ideal, was rapidly becominga Christian one.20 The provincial schools and the Christian elementary schoolsof the seventeenth century were founded principally to combat the ignoranceof God and idleness among the poor. Comenius, an educator born in 1592,believed that children are not born human, but can become human throughthe proper training — educating them thus became God’s purpose. Christianschools not only trained docile children, but also tried to make sure parentsstayed faithful and replicated the discipline of the school in the home.21

The advancements of science during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriespermanently changed the ways in which schooling was viewed and implemented.

In Francis Bacon’s unfinished utopia, The New Atlantis , the inhabitants of theperfect commonwealth organize a scientific society, the end of which is “theKnowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”22 Bacon’sbook influenced the founding of the Royal Society and the scientific academies,while some of his short essays, such as “Of Marriage and the Single Life” and“Of Parents and Children” signaled the decreasing importance of the familyand traditional social groupings.23 Descartes, too, made observations that veryclearly represented the increasing importance of science. He came to the con-clusion that he was “a substance the whole essence or nature of which is simplyto think, and which, in order to exist, has no need of any place nor depends onany material thing.”24 Science was slowly beginning to replace religion, in the

sense that it occupied the same place as an object of faith: a good in and of itself.“The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the dis-

ciplines,” wrote Foucault. “In the eighteenth century, ‘rank’ begins to define thegreat form of distribution of individuals in the educational order: rows or ranksof pupils in the class, corridors, courtyards, rank attributed to each pupil at theend of each task and each examination; the rank he obtains from week to week,month to month, year to year; an alignment of age groups, one after another;a succession of subjects taught and questions treated, according to an order of increasing difficulty.”25 The individual was more and more enmeshed in a psy-chogeography shaped according to the interests of power. Such is the shape of the new schooling being forged during the Enlightenment, soon to be systemat-

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Kenneth W. Richmond, The Free School (London: Methuen & Co., 1973), 102; Eby,40–41.20Reimer, 357. “I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the

people to send their children to school.” — Martin Luther, quoted in Sheldon Richman,Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families (Fairfax, Virginia: The Futureof Freedom Foundation, 1994), 40.

21Eby, 181; Foucault, 210–211.22Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (London: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1960), 288.23Eby, 155; John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American

Schooling , 151.24Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis,

Indiana: Hackett, 1998), 18–19.25Foucault, 222, 146–147.

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ically applied by the nation-state. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,

for example, both saw education as a way to create a more “homogenous” cit-izenry.26 Benjamin Rush, echoing Aristotle’s thinking, spoke the hidden truthof schooling: “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, butthat he is public property.”27

In the United States, the Puritans were the first people to be preoccupiedwith schooling. According to Puritan thinking, the child was “not only ignorantbut sinful in nature.”28 The preacher, coincidentally also the main teacher inthe Massachusetts Bay Colony, was there to raise them up to civilized status.29

In accordance with the philosophy of John Calvin, Massachusetts voted for “thecompulsory establishment of schools, ordering every town, that is, township, of fifty households to establish an elementary school and every town of one hundredhouseholds a secondary school as well.”30 Virginia was much less concerned withuniversal education. Tutors were often hired by the wealthy to prepare their

boys for College (usually William and Mary or a European school), but thepoor had less opportunity for education. “In moving from seventeenth-centuryMassachusetts to eighteenth-century Virginia one senses a marked decompres-sion in religious climate; in place of ‘sin and profanes’ the Virginia teacher’s foesbecome the awkward and uncouth.”31

The character of American education was nothing new: “Both [Noah] Web-ster and [Benjamin] Rush believed that the teacher should be an absolutemonarch.”32 The classroom was rapidly becoming an instrument for the forma-tion of modern republicans. Benjamin Franklin’s virtues of temperance, silence,order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness,tranquility, chastity, and humility were perhaps the Bourgeois virtues par excel-lence.33 These values were becoming ever more entrenched in society as industry

26David B. Tyack, Turning Points in American Educational History (Waltham, Mas-sachusetts: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1967), 85: George Washington on education: “Themore homogeneous our citizens can be made in these particulars, the greater will be ourprospect of permanent union. . . ” Thomas Jefferson: “They [the most beloved and trusted]are those who have been educated among them [the American people], and whose manners,morals and habits are perfectly homogeneous with those of the country.”

27Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families (Fair-fax, Virginia: The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994), 37. “But matters of public interestought to be under public supervision; at the same time also we ought not to think that anyof the citizens belongs to himself, but that all belong to the state, for each is a part of thestate, and it is natural for the superintendence of the several parts to have regard to thesuperintendence of the whole.” Aristotle, Politics. The Evolution of Education , ed. DavidSwanger (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 10.

28Tyack, 3.29Ibid., 2.30

H. G. Good, A History of Western Education: Second Edition (New York: Macmillan,1960), 383.31Tyack, 28–34.32Ibid., 88.33Ibid., 66–67, 92. Noah Webster: “.. . good republicans.. . are formed by a singular ma-

chinery in the body politic, which takes the child as soon as he can speak, checks his naturalindependence and passions, makes him subordinate to superior age, to the laws of the state,to town and parochial institutions.” Quoted in Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State:How to Liberate America’s Families (Fairfax, Virginia: The Future of Freedom Foundation,1994), 47. Benjamin Rush: “The government of schools. . . should be arbitrary. By this modeof education we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them forbecoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have beenformed from those youth who have not known or felt their own wills til [sic] they were one andtwenty years of age.” Quoted in Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist

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progressed and industriousness became the absolute good: “The workshop, the

school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time (latenesses, ab-sences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal),of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexual-ity (impurity, indecency). . . each subject find[s] himself caught in a punishable,punishing universality.”34

Arising out of the belief that the existing schools were not systematic enoughto accomplish their purpose, and starting in the urbanizing, industrializing re-gions of the East where America was acquiring a mostly foreign-born proletariat,the common school movement strove for universal “free” public education.35 Asthe state’s attitude toward economic life was becoming more non-interventionist,its attitude towards education was changing in the opposite direction. The 1837founding of the Massachusetts Board of Education and the appointment of Ho-

race Mann as its first secretary marked the transition into the modern epochof education in America.36 The blazing humanitarianism of the advocates of popular education was chiefly concerned with integrating masses of people intothe new industrial economy and diffusing social tensions created by increasinginequality. Michael B. Katz disproves the myth that the working class struggledfor popular education: “The committees [school committees] saw themselves ar-rayed against the mass of parents, whom they considered uncomprehending andindifferent. School committees were unashamedly trying to impose educationalreform and innovation on this reluctant citizenry. The communal leaders werenot answering the demands of a clamourous working class: they were imposingthe demands; they were telling the majority, your children shall be educated,and as we see fit. Promoters represented educational reform, especially the high

school, as an innovation directly aimed at urbanizing, industrializing communi-ties. The high school was simultaneously to foster mobility, promote economicgrowth, contribute to communal wealth, and save towns from disintegrating intoan immoral and degenerate chaos.”37

Horace Mann called education “the great equalizer of the conditions of men— the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”38 Since schooling was becomingmore democratic, common school reformers were trying to appeal to everyone:“To employers he [Horace Mann] claimed that schooling made workers more in-dustrious, obedient, and adaptive, thereby increasing their output; to workingpeople he held out the hope of increased earnings.”39 The overall trajectory of

America (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 36.34Foucault, 178.35Tyack, 120–121.36Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-

Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,1968), 3–13. Mann was asked if he would accept the position by Edmund Dwight, a majorindustrialist from Springfield, after Dwight had convinced the governor that the positionwas too important to give to an educator. Mann was a politician, and as Secretary of theMassachusetts Senate he had advocated railroad construction, insane asylums, and otherreforms. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York:Basic Books, 1977), 165.

37Katz, 47.38Horace Mann. The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men

(Richmond, VA: William Byrd Press, 1957), 87.39David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in

America , 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 55.

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this schooling, however, is best understood not in relation to democratic ideol-

ogy, but in its relation to industrialism and the new forms of social organizationbeing developed. Schooling was to “assimilate the immigrants and teach allchildren to shun the moral temptations of modern life.” Eventually, schoolsbecame graded, policy making centralized, curricula standardized, and archi-tecture uniform.40 What emerged were systems of public education, educationhaving acquired its entirely institutional character. This development paved theway for the sterile bureaucracy of the 20th century.41 The schools became im-portant auxiliary institutions to the factory, teaching children to be orderly andtractable. An important transitional period (1800–1830) in the developmentof industrial society in England and America was marked by a type of schoolknown as a Lancaster or monitorial school. Such schools were originally in-spired by the schooling system in India whereby the caste system was preservedthrough the gathering of hundreds of children from the bottom two castes (95%

of the population) into big rooms where they were taught self-abnegation andlittle else by a Brahmin. Joseph Lancaster, after reading a report of the Hindusystem, worked to establish similar schools in England and the United States.These schools were very much like factories, emphasizing economy, routine, andcompetition. While this particular form of school did not survive, the ethosthat informed the Lancasterian system continued. In other words, the factorycontinued to be a model for schools. Schooling became inextricably tied to thereproduction of the new industrial order and capitalist social relations. Giventhe importance of the new schooling system, it is no wonder that schoolingwould soon become compulsory.42

America’s compulsory school system was inspired by the first effective com-pulsory school system which was developed in Prussia and functional by 1819.

“In 1806, in the battle of Jena, Napoleon crushed the military forces of Prussia,and in the Treaty of Tilsit, by which peace was concluded in 1807, he exactedsevere and humiliating terms of the defeated nation.”43 A wave of Prussiannationalism swept over the nation. Creating a massive compulsory educationsystem aimed at creating patriotic masses that would die for their country wasseen by leaders as the way to assure national greatness. Johann Gottlieb Fichte,the most influential proponent of such a system, wanted students to develop alove of “regular and progressive mental activity” that would direct them towarda life of service to society. He was preoccupied with the importance of an “imageof a moral order of life” and “the good [as opposed to my good], simply as such

40Howard P. Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Urban Society (Englewood Cliffs, NewJersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 41, 164.

41Michael B. Katz emphasizes the importance of the word systems as representative of a

profound development in schooling in Michael B. Katz et al The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 351 andin Michael B. Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1987), 6.

42John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate In-vestigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling (New York: The Oxford Village Press, 2003),17–21; Carl F. Kaestle, “Introduction.” Karl F. Kaestle ed. Joseph Lancaster and the Moni-torial School Movement: A Documentary History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1973),3–48; John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press, 1999), 128. Thisbook examines the origins of modern domestication and presents an impressive account of thepractical effects of the Industrial Revolution.

43Edward H. Reisner, The Evolution of the Common School (New York: Macmillan, 1930),215.

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and for its own sake.”44 From the Swiss educator John Henry Pestalozzi (“the

father of the modern elementary school”) the Prussians learned of the great po-tential of modern common schools.45 The Prussian schools formed at this timewere divided into three categories: Akadamiensschulen for future policy makers(1% of students), Realsschulen for future professionals (5 to 7.5% of students)and Volksschulen, which emphasized obedience, for everybody else. HoraceMann visited Prussia in the 1840s and praised the Prussian schooling system inhis Seventh Annual Report. The curious thing, which Mann neglects to men-tion, is that he “arrived in Prussia when its schools were closed for vacation.He toured empty classrooms, spoke with authorities, interviewed vacationingschoolmasters, and read piles of dusty official reports.”46 Nonetheless, Mann’sglowing report accurately represents his opinion of the Prussian system. He wasparticularly impressed by the Prussian classification of scholars throughout theircourse of instruction and their enforcement of compulsory school laws: “After

a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school, — whether he be thechild of noble or of peasant, — the only two absolute grounds of exemptionfrom attendance are sickness and death. The German language has a word forwhich we have no equivalent either in language or in idea. The word is usedin reference to children, and signifies due to the school; that is, when the legalage for going to school arrives, the right of the school to the child’s attendanceattaches, just as, with us, the right of a creditor to the payment of a note orbond attaches on the day of its maturity.”47

Slowly but surely, the state was able to impose compulsory attendance onthe citizenry. During the latter half of the 19th century, the United States,France, and England, all established systems of public education with compul-sory attendance.48 John Taylor Gatto describes the imposition of compulsory

attendance in America: “Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes withguns — by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, thelast outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering their children untilthe 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to schoolunder guard.”49 By 1900, most states had government schools and compulsory

44Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (New York: Harper & Row,1968), 19–29.

45Reisner, 179–200. From pages 199–200: “Briefly to mention the major changes which areto be attributed to Pestalozzi’s precept and example, we may say that he called the attentionof his age to the social significance of the common schools; that he did much to rescue teachingin the common schools from a nondescript teaching personnel and to place it in the handsof men and women much more adequately prepared to follow teaching as an honorable andskilled calling; that he gave great impetus to the classification of pupils according to their

abilities and achievements; that he greatly expanded the curricula of the common schoolsbeyond the narrow exercise in reading which it had been before his time; that he introducedmethods of instruction which greatly facilitated the mastery of the ordinary school skills andthe acquisition of information; that he substantially improved the quality of school experienceby introducing more of concreteness, more of thinking, and more of doing into school; thathe wrought a revolution in the conception of school discipline by substituting the rule of lovefor the rule of fear and by treating children as cooperative individuals in a social enterpriserather than as potential rebels in a kingdom of repression.”

46Gatto, The Underground History , 137–144.47Horace Mann, Life and Works of Horace Mann: Vol. III (Boston: Life and Shepard

Publishers, 1891), 302–303, 365–366.48Reisner, 235–236.49John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society

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attendance.50

An area of investigation that very clearly shows the role of schooling in asociety is the conflict between a society that has schools (the United States)and societies that don’t (American Indians). During the 300 years following theestablishment of a Jesuit missionary school in Havana, Florida in 1568, Catholicand Protestant religious groups dominated attempts to educate Indian youth. Itwas in the 19th century that schooling came to be seen as a way of assimilatingyoung Indians into the dominant (white) society. Civilization, Christianity, andfarming were to be the values forced upon the uncivilized. “In 1819 Congressestablished a civilization fund, which lasted until 1873 [when the Bureau of Indian Affairs took control of Indian education], to provide financial support toreligious groups and other interested individuals who were willing to live amongand teach Indians.”51 The House Committee that recommended the creation of the fund, revealed the philosophy behind the program: “Put into the hands of

their children the primer and the hoe, and they will naturally, in time, take holdof the plough . . . and they will grow up in habits of morality and industry. . . ”52

In many treaties with Indians from 1778 till 1871 (when Congress stoppedrecognizing tribes as independent powers), the government made education pro-visions, but it was not until after the reservation system was established (fol-lowing the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the building of western railroads)and the Bureau of Indian Affairs took control that Indian education becamemore of a systematic effort of acculturation.53 A significant figure in Indianeducation was Richard Henry Pratt, who, while serving in the army, had helpedbring about the collapse of the Southern Plains tribes. The fact that there waslittle contradiction between killing Indians and educating them says a lot aboutthe way many educators viewed the natives. Pratt felt that in order to save

the man, it was necessary to kill the Indian. He believed that Indians could, if instructed properly, be fully incorporated into American society. After the de-feat of the Southern Plains tribes, Pratt took on the task of being the jailor for72 of the most intractable Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne at a new prison inFort Marion, Florida. In three years, he was able to convince himself and othersthat Indians could be transformed into proper citizens. He went on to foundthe Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. “The opening of CarlisleIndian School in 1879 came just at the time policy makers were desperatelysearching for a means of absorbing Indians into the larger society. . . Between1879 and 1900 the Bureau of Indian Affairs created twenty-four off-reservation

Publishers, 2002), 22. H.G. Good writes, “According to the Massachusetts law of 1852, allchildren between the ages of eight and fourteen years were required to attend school for twelveweeks a year, and for six of the twelve weeks the attendance had to be consecutive.” H. G.

Good, A History of Western Education: Second Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 450.50Richman, 44.51Jon Reyhaer and Jeanne Eder, “A History of Indian Education.” Jon Reyhaer ed. Teach-

ing American Indian Students (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma, 1992), 33–44.52William T. Hagan, American Indians: Revised Edition (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1979), 87–88. Joel Spring writes, “In the early days of missionary schools,teaching the value of work became a major source of conflict between teachers and par-ents.” Joel Spring, The Cultural Transformation of a Native American Family and Its Tribe 1763–1995 (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 69. Along with theteaching of “a good work ethic” came profound social transformations. For example, “AmongChoctaws, who traditionally did not have social classes, schooling became an important meansof creating and distinguishing social classes.” Spring, 201.

53Reyhaer and Eder, 33–37.

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schools roughly modeled after the Carlisle prototype. By 1900 the Indian School

system had taken on the shape of an institutional hierarchy. When the systemfunctioned according to plan, students progressed from reservation day schoolsto reservation boarding schools, finally moving on to Carlisle-type off-reservationschools. By 1900 three quarters of all Indian children were enrolled in boardingschool, with approximately a third of this number in off-reservation schools.”54

Children “were taken from their grieving parents and kept for years, punishedfor speaking their own language, and brainwashed of all traces of Indianness.”55

Students, often with the help of their parents, sometimes went to greatlengths to resist the schooling experience. The problem, as one Indian agentput it, was that they had “not yet reached that state of civilization to know theadvantages of education, and consequently look upon school work with abhor-rence.” When parents refused to enroll their children in schools, Indian agentsemployed by the state had the power to withhold rations or use the police to

track down the children and force them to go to school. Thomas J. Morgan,the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, wrote in 1892 that he did not believe thatIndians “have any right to forcibly [!] keep their children out of school. . . ”56

Students resisted in a variety of different ways: simply running away was verycommon, some risking death or dying on their journey home. Even “mysterious”fires were somewhat common. In 1897, two Carlisle girls tried to burn down thegirls’ dormitory twice in the same day: once right after the bell for supper andonce just after the bell for chapel. At Fort Mojave, several kindergartners werelocked up in the school jail for repeatedly running away from school. Duringbreakfast one morning, the kindergartners not locked up used a large log as abattering ram, broke through the jail door, and ran for the river bottom withtheir rescued classmates.57

Schools represented, especially to American Indians, a new relationship tospace, which was conceived of in linear terms. Lines, corners, squares, and straitrows represented industrial civilization’s relationship to wilderness. Space wascolonized by the disciplinary imperative: freedom of movement was carefullyregulated. As the student learns to heed the teacher’s commands, he internal-

54David Wallace Adams, “Foreword to the Paperback Edition.” Richard Henry Pratt, Bat-tlefield & Classroom: An Autobiography by Richard Henry Pratt (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), xi-xv [from which the quote was taken]; Robert M. Utley, “Introduc-tion.” Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield & Classroom: An Autobiography by Richard Henry Pratt (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), xix-xx. “By 1899 over $2,500,000was being expended annually on 148 boarding schools and 225 day schools with almost 20,000children in attendance.” Hagan, 134.

55Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (Oklahoma: University of Ok-lahoma Press, 1970), 287–288. In The Cultural Transformation of a Native American Family

and Its Tribe 1763–1995 (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), JoelSpring writes, “The specific values that common school reformers of the period wanted instilled[Protestantism, republicanism, and capitalism] matched those advocated for the civilizing of Native Americans.” Since Native American children were considered lazy by missionaries,Lancaster’s method of instruction, which encouraged orderliness, industriousness, and obedi-ence, was at one time used in Indian schools: “. . . many of the missionary teachers sponsoredby the Civilization Fund Act established schools among the Choctaws and Cherokees usingLancasterian methods of instruction.” (Both quotes taken from page 29)

56David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875–1928 (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 221.

57Ibid., 210–230: A group of Navajo students who were once asked to write a poem aboutschool, responded with the following: If I do not believe you / The things you say, / Maybe I will not tell you / That is my way. // Maybe you think I believe you / That thing you say,/ But always my thoughts stay with me / My own way.

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izes the discipline that shapes individuals. “A relation of surveillance, defined

and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as anadditional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it andwhich increases its efficiency.”58 Is it any wonder that schools resemble pris-ons? As Morris and Rothman wrote, “With no ironies intended, they [19thcentury prison reformers] talked about the penitentiary as serving as a modelfor the family and the school.”59 Foucault has written of the transition from thepenality of spectacular torture to that of an organized prison system, roughlycoinciding with the emergence of the nation-state and the Industrial Revolution:“The reform of criminal law must be read as a strategy for the rearrangementof the power to punish, according to modalities that render it more regular,more effective, more constant and more detailed in its effects. . . ”60 An earlyreformer, Cesare Beccaria, wrote that “the most certain method of preventingcrimes is, [sic] to perfect the system of education.”61 Some time later Horace

Mann declared that “School is the cheapest police.”62By the time the common schools had proven their utility, the very wealthy

took a marked interest in education. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, JamesDuke, and Leland Stanford created universities bearing their names. The uni-versities were meant to train the middlemen of the American system who woulduphold its values: teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, techni-cians, politicians. As late as 1915, Carnegie and Rockefeller alone were spendingmore on education than the government was. “In our dreams . . . people yieldthemselves with perfect docility to our molding hands [those of Carnegie’s Gen-eral Education Board].”63 Marvin Lazerson wrote of the formation of the urbanschool system at the turn of the century: “What had been an amorphous col-lection of parochial and virtually autonomous agencies under the guidance of

transient untrained teachers became an integrated system whose characteristicswere strikingly similar across the nation, and whose tone was set by a profes-sionally certified interest group.”64 By 1914 twelve of the twenty largest citiesin Massachusetts had public kindergartens, which were intended to domesti-cate the slum child, and teach the parent, through the child, how to be a goodparent.65 Friedrich Froebel had founded the first kindergarten (or, literally, agarden of children) in 1837, and the proliferation of kindergartens allowed edu-cators to better shape the young child’s character.66 The new schooling systemwas seemingly unstoppable, irreversible. “Just see,” said Carnegie, “wheneverwe peer into the first tiny springs of the national life, how this true panaceafor all the ills of the body politic bubbles forth — education, education, edu-

58Foucault, 176.59Norval Morris and David J. Rothman eds. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice

of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 106.60Foucault, 80–81.61Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (Boston: International Pocket

Library, 1992), 97. Beccaria nonetheless did not foresee the rise of common schools andcompulsory schooling.

62Gatto, The Underground History , 256.63Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (New York: Harper-

Collins, 1995), 256–257; Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling , 52.

64Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870– 1915 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971), xiv.

65Ibid., 56.66“History of Education,” 55.

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cation.”67 There was resistance, but usually not enough to really threaten this

constant bubbling forth. The Irish community, for example, boycotted and mayhave tried to burn down a school in Lowell, Massachusetts; but, over time, tru-ant officers were employed and the institution moved ahead, as it did acrossthe United States.68 Parents often faced fines or the possibility of arrest if theyrefused to send their children.

The Progressive movement (1890–1930) was philosophically concerned withtailoring education to the needs of the child. Practically, this meant catego-rizing, observing, testing, and controlling the child to smooth the transition tocorporate capitalism.69 Education became quite the religious calling: “Everyteacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this waythe teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of thetrue kingdom of God,” wrote John Dewey.70 Understood metaphorically, the

kingdom of God could signify a new era of capitalism; although Dewey con-sidered himself a socialist. To focus on politics would be to miss the point —social order, the “subsumption of the individual” has become a good in and of itself. Progress is what matters — the truth behind the capitalism. Raymond E.Callahan observed the real structural changes shaping modern schooling: theadoption of business values in educational administration started about 1900and by 1930 administrators saw themselves as business managers or “schoolexecutives.” Emphasis was placed on accounting, finance, public relations, andrunning schools like businesses. At the annual meeting of the National Edu-cation Association in 1905, George H. Martin (Secretary of the State Board of Education in Massachusetts) decried the fact that “educational processes seemunscientific, crude, and wasteful” when compared to modern business practices.

In 1907, William C. Bagley published Classroom Management, which concerneditself with the most efficient operation of the “school plant.” School boards wereincreasingly dominated by businessmen, and a more utilitarian, career-focusededucation was called for.71

“We couldn’t ask more from a patriotic motive than Scientific Managementgives from a selfish one,” said Theodore Roosevelt, obviously full of enthu-siasm.72 Frederick Winslow Taylor (who developed Scientific Management)clearly grasped the import of his ideas when he wrote, “In the past the man hasbeen first; in the future the system must be first.”73 Taylor saw that the besttype of industrial management in operation in his time was based on the work-man taking initiative and the employer giving some special incentive in orderto keep the worker motivated and productive. Taylor’s idea of Scientific Man-agement or task management was that the employer could even more effectively

and efficiently secure the initiative of workmen by studying the tasks of the

67Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: BasicBooks, 1977), 19.

68Ibid., 164.69Ibid, 181–199.70Gatto, The Underground History , xxvii-xxviii.71Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces

that Have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools (Toronto: University of Chicago, 1962),preface, 4–10.

72Ibid., 20.73Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper

& Brothers, 1919) [copyright 1911], 7.

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workmen and developing a science for each element of a man’s work and then

selecting and training workmen best suited for the tasks which the employerhad familiarized himself with. By studying tasks, assigning workmen to definitetasks which they are to perform within a specified amount of time, and monitor-ing the workmen’s progress, the employer takes on new responsibilities, but willbe able to greatly increase the efficiency of his operation. Taylor was indifferentto the dehumanizing aspects of Scientific Management; he felt that an increasein efficiency would bring greater prosperity to all; and the rights of “the people”(in other words, people as consumers) were more important to him than thoseof employers or employees.74 Scientific Management sounded the death knellfor what was left of the dignity or autonomy of labor — a prerequisite for thefast-paced consumer culture of today.75

There was much enthusiasm for scientific management in the corporate worldand especially the corporate media: articles appeared in popular magazines seek-

ing to apply Taylor’s principles to the army, the legal profession, the home, thefamily, the household, the church, and of course, education.76 Taylor’s ideas“were adopted, interpreted, and applied chiefly by administrators; and whilethe greatest impact was upon administration, the administrator, and the pro-fessional training programs of administration, the influence extended to all of American education from the elementary schools to the universities.”77 An ab-stract of a speech (regarding the application of scientific management to schools)delivered to the High School Teachers Association of New York City was pub-lished in the Bulletin:

A [.] Purpose or object of ‘Scientific Management.’

1. To increase the efficiency of the laborer, i.e., the pupil.

2. To increase quality of the product, i.e., the pupil.

3. Thereby to increase the amount of output and the value to thecapitalist. . . 78

Another development was the Gary Plan, started in Gary, Indiana in 1908by William A. Wirt, superintendent of schools there at the time. The GaryPlan consisted of the departmentalization of school subjects and children being“platooned” into groups that would use assembly rooms, gymnasiums, shops,laboratories, and playgrounds at the same time as other groups used classroomsso that all facilities were being utilized; and at the sounding of the bell, chil-dren would change classes. The Gary Plan allowed administrators to show howefficient they were. After it was endorsed by the Federal Bureau of Education

in 1914, it was blocked in New York in 1917 where riots broke out in opposition74Ibid. “No efficient teacher would think of giving a class of students an indefinite lesson

to learn. Each day a definite, clear-cut task is set by the teacher before each scholar, statingthat he must learn just so much of the subject; and it is only by this means that proper,systematic progress can be made by the students. The average boy would go very slowly if,instead of being given a task, he were told to do as much as he could.” (p.120)

75John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press, 1999), 170: “The ageof the consumer began from the systematic destruction of much of the last autonomy of theproducer.”

76Callahan, 23.77Ibid., 41.78Ibid., 58: Some suggested labor saving devices were printed outlines, seating plans, recita-

tion cards, and attendance sheets.

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to it: schools were stoned and police tires slashed and 300 students (mostly

Jewish) were arrested. Nonetheless, by 1929, the Gary Plan or variants of itwere in operation in 1,068 schools in 202 cities. After 1930, this specific form of schooling declined, yet Wirt’s innovations left a permanent mark on schoolingin general.79

With the increasing specialization of American life came the growth of spe-cialized training in education. As John Taylor Gatto observed, “Before the 20thcentury there was no parasitic army of assistant principles, coordinators, andassorted bureaucratic specialists.”80 The increasing complexity of the admin-istrative hierarchy and the proliferation of standardized tests helped to ensureteacher conformity. Given impetus from the work of Edward Lee Thorndike,standardized testing spread rapidly after World War I and the Carnegie Corpo-ration poured over $3 million into the effort.81 Worldwide, universal primaryeducation became the goal of virtually all governments in the post-World War

II era. Also in this era, higher education experienced tremendous growth inindustrialized nations. More and more money is being put toward postgradu-ate training and scientific and engineering research and experimental develop-ment.82 Schooling in America looks now like a finely tuned behavior modifi-cation machine, channeling people into various meaningless jobs for the rest of their lives.83 Schooling produces masses of people, not autonomous individuals.Individual parts of the schooling machine don’t really matter any more. Tech-nology has obviously served to institute new forms of social control, as Marcuseobserved in One-Dimensional Man.84 Our very consciousness is surrounded onall sides by a mass media, and in this modern context, schooling becomes atechnique of propaganda that functions through the use of knowledge, not inthe service of any classical ideal. When Jacques Ellul wrote about modern pro-

paganda in Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes, he emphasized thatit is above all a set of methods of a technological society based on mass mediathat addresses individuals only as members of a mass that shares common feel-ings and myths. Ellul pointed out that not all propaganda is explicitly political.Schooling is a type of sociological propaganda, aimed at the integration of theindividual into the social group.85 As students go hazily from class to class,box to box, schooling as a technique of social control perpetuates itself. And asleftists drone on about better education for the people, for the masses of people,they are unaware of what an important role they play in reproducing existentsocial and economic formations.

79Ibid., 128–146; Gatto, The Underground History , 187–189.

80Gatto, The Underground History , 193.81Gerald L. Gutek, A History of the Western Educational Experience (New York: Random

House, 1972), 378; Bowles and Gintis, 195–197.82Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World , 1914–1991 (New York:

Vintage, 1995), 295–296, 522–525.83“One of the distinctive features of modern schooling is the use of classroom and school

organization to consciously shape the social behaviors of students.” Joel Spring, The Cultural Transformation of a Native American Family and Its Tribe 1763–1995 (Mahwah, New Jersey:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 200.

84Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).85Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage,

1973). From page 13: “No contrast can be tolerated between teaching and propaganda, be-tween the critical spirit formed by higher education and the exclusion of independent thought.One must utilize the education of the young to condition them to what comes later.”

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Chapter 3

Theories of Schooling

“Why not whip the teacher when the student misbehaves?” — Dio-genes of Sinope

Schooling is seen as a good thing. Those who are uneducated are seen aslacking something essential to being fully functioning, fully human. From Platoto Comenius to Kant, humanity is something that is imposed upon the young.Even Paolo Freire, a favorite of leftists, believes in a “humanizing pedagogy,”presumably one that makes people more fully human.1 We need to spend lessmoney on the military, more money on schools, say the progressives. Theircomplete identification (“we”) with the nation-state is utterly pathetic. “Hu-manitarianism” has saturated the left and the right: everyone is working hardoppressing themselves, all for a better humanity, a better future. Like George

Bush, the progressives don’t want to leave a single child behind .2In Hebrew there is one word for both “education” and “chastisement.”3 The

powerful men of the ancient world were rather clear about what schooling en-tailed. Today it is of the utmost importance to conceal the role of schoolingin society. Submission to authority is always the goal of schooling. The powerwielded by authorities — the power to reward and punish, to habituate theindividual to desired patterns of thought and action — works to integrate theindividual into a hierarchical social order. 19th century prison reformers andprogressive school reformers were working to make this integrating functionmore efficient and more total in its effects. Both groups were humanitarians be-cause they sought to make the individual better adapted (obviously doing her agreat service) to a new set of social conditions; society had to be shaped into a

different form, re-formed. Society is the main actor, and individuals merely re-spond. To those who haven’t picked up on this clever phrasing, “society” can beunderstood as those who have the power to make administrative and legislativedecisions. Individuals only act as a part of “society” to the extent that theysubmit to existent social conditions, and possibly try to influence those whohold positions of power. As John Dewey put it, “through education society canformulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus

1Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum International PublishingGroup, 2003), 68.

2John Taylor Gatto, “Against School,” Harper’s (September 2003): 34. Contains theGeorge Bush quote being alluded to.

3Marrou, 159.

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shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to

move.”

4

At first glance Dewey seems to be saying that education can determine thedirection in which society goes, but in fact he says that society shapes itself through education, so education is really not determining anything. In otherwords, schooling is a technique that society uses. One cannot fault him for suchtruthfulness. Durkheim agreed that education is “only the image and reflectionof society. It imitates and reproduces the latter in abbreviated forms. It doesnot create it.”5 Educators respond to changes in society and make sure theirschooling produces the necessary products. In a Harvard lecture of the 1920’sGeorge S. Counts said the following: “This is not the place to evaluate industrialcivilization. . . Education must come to terms with industrial civilization and dis-cover its tasks in the new age.”6 Educators work within institutional confines,within the confines of their social roles as authorities and slaves (just like the

Greek pedagogues) of the powers that be. Since most educators believe unques-tioningly that schools serve a positive function in society, all of their theories of schooling and ideas for reform are likely to reinforce the basic assumption thatschools are a good thing.7

Modern theories of schooling are based on a social ideal of progress. Thisis basically a conservative ideal in the sense that technological change tendsto be irreversible and reform tends to build upon itself, by and large keepinginstitutional structures and social relations intact. The more things changethe more they stay the same. Schools have been steadily expanding (progress)and have been able to reform by accretion.8 The technical basis of modernindustry may be revolutionary in the Marxist sense of bringing us closer to rev-olution within a linear model of historical progress, but is this revolutionary at

all? Marx himself praised the essentially “dangerous character” of revolution-ists such as “steam, electricity, and the self-acting mule.”9 Attributing such acharacter to technology is clearly an oversight, more or less incompatible withany revolutionary theory based on the need for an insurrectional rupture withour technological society. Marx’s oversight stems from his failure to adequatelyidentify the relationship between the productive apparatus and the capitalistsystem that produces it and to fully recognize Capital’s domesticating function.The writings of Jacques Camatte and Fredy Perlman are excellent in expandingupon these themes. In many ways, resistance to the proliferation of the fac-tory system parallels the resistance to compulsory schooling. When a definiteloss of autonomy was seen as a new and threatening imposition, radical actsof resistance and sabotage were not uncommon. The industrial system (alongwith puritanical morality) served to domesticate the exploited, allowing for re-

sistance to be more easily recuperated through institutional channels such as

4John Dewey, “The Democratic Conception in Education,” in The Evolution of Education ed. David Swanger (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 232.

5Quoted in Geoffrey Walford and W.S.F Pickering eds. Durkheim and Modern Education (New York: Routledge, 1998), 4.

6George S. Counts, Secondary Education and Industrialism (Norwood, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press, 1929), 11–12.

7Jill Haunold, “It’s About Time: Schooling as Oppression,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (#57, Spring-Summer 2004): 45.

8Tyack and Hansot, 11.9Saul K. Padover ed. The Essential Marx: The Non-Economic Writings (New York:

Signet, 1979), 355.

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union bargaining and political reformism. What were considered factory virtues

are virtually the same thing as school virtues. Discontents who have internalizedthese virtues aim at tinkering with the repressive apparatus, not destroying it.Modern theories of schooling can be said to begin with Rousseau. Rousseau

considered civilization some form of mistake, but he did not oppose it. In hisview, society was the source of all evil. He did not, however, see the teacher aspart of this “evil,” and consequently gave teachers invaluable advice about howto exercise their supposedly righteous control over their pupils. “Begin then, bystudying your pupils more thoroughly, for it is very certain that you do not knowthem,” he wrote.10 Rousseau gave the following advice in regard to the wayteachers should control their students: “Let him [the student] believe that he isalways in control though it is always you [the teacher] who really controls. Thereis no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.” 11

This statement describes much of the philosophy of modern schooling. The

institutionalized authority of the teacher is a given. The question is how theteacher can make best use of this authority. Rousseau gave an excellent answer.To think that this somehow encourages the freedom and independence of thestudent is reasonable, as long as that freedom and independence is exercisedwithin the boundaries set by the authorities. As B.F. Skinner said approvingly,Rousseau “did not fear the power of positive reinforcement.”12 B.F. Skinnerwas an influential behaviorist psychologist of the mid-twentieth century. Hisoverriding interest was in the control and modification of human behavior — apractice he believed could solve the world’s problems — if only everyone couldvalue efficiency over freedom.

B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity is a work of profound scien-tific insight — but total crap compared to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

Skinner feels that what people call autonomy is an illusion since no behavioris uncaused.13 He assumes that autonomy refers to the existence of causes of behavior and not the nature of those causes. The nature of the causes of humanbehavior is contingent upon social relations — which Skinner doesn’t want toget into. The application of his science is allowed free reign only when reifiedsocial roles separate the controllers from the controlled — the managers fromthe managed. And since the application of Skinner’s science of human behavioris his top priority, institutionalized authority and its relationship to scientificadvancement must remain unquestioned. Skinner sees any questioning of thedesirability of scientific advancement as taking “a stubborn position of not know-ing” and valuing “ignorance for its own sake.”14 So anyone who abandons scien-tific thinking is doing so “for its own sake,” whereas the enlightened specialistobviously has a multiplicity of valid reasons for their practice. Skinner’s agenda

is made somewhat clearer in Reflections on Behaviorism and Society, where hebemoans the “damaging” influence of “noncontingent reinforcers” — or thingsthat come to us for free. Such things do not allow the “control of people bypeople” to realize its full potentiality. So a gift economy is bad and a capitalist

10Eby, 329–337.11Michael P. Smith, The Libertarians and Education (London: George Allen & Unwin,

1983), 8.12B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hacket Publishing

Company, 2002), 40.13Ibid., 19.14B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1953), 5.

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economy is good because money is “possibly the greatest of all conditioned rein-

forcers.” As our social environment becomes increasingly complex, more controlmust be exercised over the individual growing up. “Programmed sequences of contingencies, in the hands of skillful teachers and counselors, can lead to thecomplex repertoires demanded by a social environment,” writes Skinner.15

The implications of Skinner’s ideas for the modern classroom are profound.They explain much of the behavior of teachers and provide a scientific foundationfor their future progress. He saw more efficient teaching practices as extremelyimportant, hoping that teaching could eventually become a science.16 Indeed,much educational theory in the last 50 years has shared Skinner’s behavioristconception of teaching, an advancement from the older method of mirroring thefactory. It is not the rules or the enforcement of rules that is most important— it is the habitual following of those rules that helps the individual internalizedesired patterns of behavior. The focus shifts from more obvious forms of disci-

pline to the use of techniques which encourage a self-discipline which diminishesthe need for those more obvious forms of discipline. Even early in the 19thcentury, Fichte saw this as ideal. The pupil of pure morality (a concept similarto what Jesuits might call being a man for others), Fichte professed, “goes forthat the proper time as a fixed and unchangeable machine produced by this art[teaching], which indeed could not go otherwise than as it has been regulatedby the art, and needs no help at all, but continues of itself according to itsown law.”17 This is the essential feature of modern schooling. Fichte called theideal pedagogy an art, Skinner would call it a science, but the message remainsthe same. Even when the teaching of values is the professed goal of pedagogy,if modern techniques and methods of organization are employed, the approach(which Skinner might term “mentalistic” or not thoroughly focused on scientific

analysis) has similar goals and effects upon the student as a purely behavioristapproach.During the 1950’s, Benjamin Bloom and a team of specialists worked very

hard to put together a book (in two volumes) called Taxonomy of EducationalObjectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, which had a significantinfluence on government schools in America. It was designed as a tool to helpeducators classify the ways in which students are to respond to their lessons.Thanks to standardized testing, intelligence is the new idol that educationaltheory must bow to. The ideal student is a well-behaved and objectively in-telligent automaton.18 The second volume deals with “affective objectives,” inother words character development, attitude, values — things that Bloom feelsare not graded mainly due to the “inadequacy of the appraisal techniques andthe ease with which a student may exploit his ability to detect the responses

which will be rewarded and the responses which will be penalized.” “In con-trast,” Bloom writes, “it is assumed that a student who responds in the desirableway on a cognitive measure does indeed possess the competence which is beingsampled.”19 Due to this danger, educators must stress not just the outward

15B. F. Skinner, Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 12–13, 22.

16Ibid., 129,132; B.F. Skinner, “How to Teach Animals,” Skinner for the Classroom: Se-lected Papers (Champaign, Illinois: Research Press, 1982), 261.

17Fichte, 31.18Benjamin S. Bloom ed., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Ed-

ucational Goals: Handbook I: Cognitive Domain (New York: David McKay, 1956).19Benjamin S. Bloom et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of

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conformity of socialization, but “internalization,” or the student’s acquisition of

values organized into a moral code used to regulate one’s life.

20

The book goeson to classify in a hierarchy the various responses to teaching that a teachermust bring about in the student. The peak of this internalization process is thestudent’s “characterization by a value or value complex.”21 An example of thiswould be a student who has learned not to talk back: such a student stays quietand only speaks when the teacher allows.

A less refined list of goals/functions of schooling was presented in the early20th century by Alexander Inglis. In his book Principles of Secondary Edu-cation, he lists the “six important functions of secondary education; (1) theadjustive or adaptive function; (2) the integrating function; (3) the differentiat-ing function; (4) the propaedeutic function [training the future guardians of thesystem]; (5) the selective function; (6) the diagnostic and directive function [notnecessarily in that order].”22 So basically, students must be adjusted so that

they behave, integrated into the social group, tested, sorted, classified, trained,etc. It would be difficult to better describe the function of schooling. Inglis seesthe school for what it is, “a social institution or agency maintained by societyfor the purpose of assisting in the maintenance of its own stability and in thedirection of its own progress.”23 In this sense it is clear that it is society andthe network of control that covers it that must be destroyed. It is hardly radi-cal to substitute the existing society for another one which will serve the samefunctions in different ways.

In many ways, Marx’s theory of alienation explains the student’s situationas well as the worker’s. Does not the knowledge that the student works toaccumulate confront him “as something alien, as a power independent of theproducer”?24 And to use Marx’s words for the student, one could say that the

student only feels herself outside her schoolwork, and in her schoolwork feelsoutside herself .25 Life itself becomes a means to life; or, as the situationists felt,life has been reduced to mere survival. School is undoubtedly an institution thatinitiates students into a life of alienated living. In school, the student learnsthat learning requires its usually authoritarian counterpart: teaching. Once theyoung learn dependence, the other lessons come much easier. Is not knowledgetreated as a commodity, and, as such, fetishized by the consumers/producers?It begins to acquire all the metaphysical power that modern man attaches tofacts. All knowledge becomes interchangeable and divorced from social context,and units of knowledge are to be accumulated — having practical applicationonly within the specialized world of academia. The detached objectivity of the scholar is idealized. As Raoul Vaneigem wrote, “Knowledge is inseparable

Educational Goals: Handbook II: Affective Domain (New York: David McKay, 1964), 17.20Ibid., 29–30.21Ibid., 176–185.22Inglis, 375–376.23Ibid., 340.24Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Prometheus,

1988), 71.25Ibid., 74: “The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels

outside himself. . . His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It istherefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsionexists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself,is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification.”

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from the use that is made of it.”26 And academic knowledge — in this sense

knowledge that is not used against the interests of power — can only serve toenlarge and consolidate power. “What makes power hold good,” said Foucault,“what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as aforce that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure,forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productivenetwork which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negativeinstance whose function is repression.”27 In the era of fragmentary power, whenall can share in its ability to compensate for the poverty of our everyday lives,the world of schooling reinforces power by managing and allocating knowledge— possibly power’s greatest tool.

When Marx mentioned schools, he merely said that “government and churchshould rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.”28 The pris-tine school! Divorced from its social context, the school can look like a rather

positive thing. But as long as there are governments and churches, they aregoing to have something to do with schooling. Schooling has a long history of pseudo-opposition from libertarians: Tolstoy, Ferrer, and Freire did not critiqueschools as such, but called for different educational practices.29 In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire even talks of the pedagogy of the revolutionary leader-ship, tipping his hat to authoritarians such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.30

Revolutionary educational practices, if they are not based on a fixed ideologyto which the masses are to be converted, cannot have anything to do withschooling or schools. Schools are institutions, and all institutions have a certaindegree of permanence that can extend beyond the control of their initiators;they are not associations developed for a specific limited purpose and they arenot self-organized. Institutions perpetuate themselves because people organize

each other’s living activity through them, not living for themselves. In orderfor educational practices to have a subversive character they must not aim tofit themselves into the dominant society as an “alternative” to what is alreadyoffered. They must be a part of a community actively seeking to undermine thedominant social order. The ateneos, or storefront cultural centers of Spain inpre-Civil War times which had classes for those who wanted to learn to readand write, provide a simple example. The Spanish anarchists did not try tobuild an “alternate society,” but rather a “counter-society.”31 Some conceptionof the difference between the two is essential. In order to destroy capitalism andthe state apparatus, we cannot simply build new institutions and expect the oldones to fall apart. Only through attacking the old institutions and organizingourselves in a decentralized manner can we function outside the realm of capital-ism and attack it as a social system. Capitalist social relations must be actively

subverted; we cannot simply form co-operative or collective exchange relation-ships which reproduce capitalist logic. The Soviet Union, for example, was nevercommunist in any real sense; it could best be described as state-capitalist.

Max Stirner, a poor German schoolteacher, was one of the most radical

26Knabb, 168.27Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977

(New York: Pantheon, 1980), 119.28Padover, 226.29Michael P. Smith, The Libertarians and Education.30Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed .31Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868–1936 (San Francisco:

AK Press, 1998), 48.

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thinkers of the 19th century. In “The False Principle of Our Education,” Stirner

criticized popular theories of schooling of his time: “Only a formal and materialtraining is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of thehumanists, and only ‘useful citizens’ out of those of the realists, both of whomare indeed nothing but subservient people.”32 Stirner saw the ideas and knowl-edge acquired in schooling as being detached from the person who supposedlylearns such things. Stirner criticized all abstractions which are held above peo-ple’s own wills and desires. In an authoritarian society, such abstractions orideologies seem to govern our actions to the extent that people merely acceptthe idea that they should serve such things, such “wheels in the head.” Clearlyschooling, which subordinates the individual to the social group, utilizes suchabstractions in the socialization process. In criticizing the institutionalizationof the socialization process that was taking place in his time, Stirner criticizedauthority — the crux of the matter, around which all socialization revolves.33

A more in-depth critique of schooling in particular came from Ivan Illichin Deschooling Society, published in 1970. Illich was opposed to the schoolas an institution and formed a cogent critique of its functions. Schools dividesocial reality: “education becomes unworldly and the world becomes nonedu-cational.”34 Illich saw childhood as a product of industrial society and a socialcategory that perpetuates the authority of the schoolteacher. “Once young peo-ple have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, theyare conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. ‘Instruction’ smothersthe horizon of their imaginations. They cannot be betrayed, but only short-changed, because they have been taught to substitute expectations for hope.”35

His criticisms of schooling are manifestly evident and entirely valid: “The schoolsystem today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches

throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society’s myth, theinstitutionalization of that myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritualwhich reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.”36

The themes inherent in theories of schooling have been rehashed for cen-turies. It is all too easy to see the devastating effects of schooling in our every-day lives: people have lost their imaginations and others must determine themeaning of our lives. Students are taught to recognize that they are constantlyunder surveillance. The rooms are distributed along a corridor at regular inter-vals. The teacher stands in front of the class making sure that everyone displaysacquiescence in receiving the lesson. Later the students are examined, tested —observed and controlled. The examination “manifests the subjection of thosewho are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected.The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in

the examination all its visible brilliance.”37 We must be made dependent, evenhelpless — memorizing bits of knowledge without any need. All sorts of indus-tries would collapse, John Taylor Gatto observed, “Unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.”38 Capital must

32Stirner, “The False Principle of Our Education”33Joel Spring, A Primer of Libertarian Education (Montreal, Quebec: Black Rose Books,

1975), 50–51.34Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 35.35Ibid., 56.36Ibid., 54.37Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish , 184–185.38Gatto, Dumbing Us Down , 9.

27



dominate the future not just through the production of new commodity-things

and technologies, but through the production of commodity-people. Every in-dividual is merely a component, a piece of machinery. This is the essence of modern schooling. To argue otherwise would be mundane, untrue, and utterlyacademic.

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Chapter 4

Notes on the Poverty of

Student Life

“I suspect God of being a Leftist intellectual” — Graffiti Paris, 1968

The university is the training grounds for the future ruling class and theirmost dependable lackeys. Most university students — after being constantlyadjusted throughout their youth — are already well adjusted to subservientroles. They are model consumers, if not always model students. The studentswho are content with their social role as students have accepted passivity. Someaccept passivity by ignoring all politics, others by becoming politically active.The result is the same — a useful citizen — useful to others. “Modern capital-

ism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. Thestudent is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a re-hearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as therest. . . Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing intohis initiation group to hide from that future.”1

Students are vaguely conscious of why universities exist and what is ex-pected of them — most simply don’t care. To be (a)pathetic is to be fash-ionable. When Nietzsche said that the idealism of humanity was on the vergeof deteriorating into nihilism and meaninglessness, he couldn’t have been moreprophetic. Instead of the transvaluation of all values that Nietzsche called for,however, we have experienced a further devaluation (Nietzsche saw nihilism asthe devaluation of the highest values — a condition at once regrettable and fullof possibility). Money, too, is fashionable — how could it not be? Wilhelm Re-ich’s middle-class reactionary dominates the radio, the television, and popularculture in general.2 He is a person who gives the appearance of independence, of rebelliousness, while being Capital’s most faithful servant. He is a person whohas been yelled at, disciplined, and brutalized during the socialization processonly to grow up with no greater desire than to do the same to others. Oftenhe is the hero of high school, the well-trained athlete, the well-trained imbecile.

1“On the Poverty of Student Life,” reprinted in Dark Star, Beneath the Paving Stones:Situationists and the Beach , May 1968 (San Francisco: AK Press, 2001), 10. This essay wasquite an inspiration. See http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4

2Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1970).

29

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4



What Max Stirner said of college students in general clearly applies: “Trained in

the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled, they continue drilling.”

3

The modern student thrives in a milieu of privileged consumption. All sociallife is subordinated to the imperative to accumulate commodities that affirm thestudent’s chosen identity within the social group — so much so that it is possiblefor the student to ignore much of the substance of schooling. Entertainment isorganized around (sub)cultural identity — a dead world of media swill with anappearance vaguely reminiscent of actual life (which has been vanquished bymodern capitalism). Sexual activity, long repressed, is now tolerated within thecontext of relationships which could only be described as masturbatory. If ithad any meaning, if it opened up new realms of communication, sex would bea force antagonistic to schooling — instead it is a safety valve. In Civilizationand Its Discontents, Freud said that civilization uses sexual energy for its ownpurposes (displacing it through work, for example). We are now so alienated

from each other that it is difficult to conceive of a world in which our energies anddesires are not systematically controlled and manipulated — a world in whichmeaningful communication is commonplace. Our capacity for self-regulationand autonomy has been schooled out of us; we are left with a character armor(the colonization of Capital) which protects us from expressing ourselves freely.4

“Politics, morality, and culture are all in ruins — and have now reached thepoint of being marketed as such, as their own parody, the spectacle of decadencebeing the last [hopefully] desperate attempt to stabilize the decadence of thespectacle.”5 Religion is a perfect example of this. It is now often marketedas spirituality, an admission of some vague need to retreat from reality and beenriched by assorted mystical beliefs. Any justification for the present madnesswill do. Depression is endemic. Drugs and alcohol help out as much as possible,

setting the stage for all social interaction. But is it enough? Consumer goodshelp fill the void, but are they sufficient? So far, it seems to be. The life thatgets away from us can always be sold back to us by the mass media in the formof images. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.“For in the mass society, individuals have a tendency to withdraw from eachother more and more. Their relationship is only artificial; it is only the productof the mass media,” wrote Jacques Ellul.6

The student often finds more meaningful forms of escapism — ideologicalescapism. Students are for justice, Che Guevara t-shirts, and affirmative action.And the socialist organizations are waiting to recruit. The student’s “rent-a-

3Max Stirner, “The False Principle of Our Education”4Jay Amrod and Lev Chernyi, “Beyond Character and Morality: Towards Transparent

Communications and Coherent Organization.” Howard J. Ehrlich ed. Reinventing Anarchy,

Again (San Francisco, California: AK Press, 1996), 321: “Throughout the first years of ourlives we were forced not just to internalize a few aspects of capital, but to build up a structureof internalizations. As our capacity for coherent natural self-regulation was systematicallybroken down, a new system of self regulation took its place, a coherent system, incorporatingall the aspects of self-repression. We participated in capital’s ongoing project of colonizationby colonizing ourselves, by continually working at the construction of a unitary character-structure (character armor), a unitary defense against all drives, feelings, and desires whichwe learned were dangerous to express. In the place of our original transparent relations to ourworld, we created a structure of barriers to our self-expression which hides us from ourselvesand others.”

5“On the Poverty of Student Life”6Ellul, Propaganda , 210.

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crowd militance for the latest good cause is an aspect of his real impotence.”7

The student serves the cause and the cause serves to justify the student’s sub-servience. The student activist consciously aligns their thinking with what theyperceive to be that of an oppressed group (which they may or may not be amember of). Now they can speak for that group and articulate the desires of that group, usually phrased as demands made of the authorities. Every person,every group, must be represented. Representation is at the heart of the logicof modern politics, and its so-called enemies uphold this logic better than any-one. Such thinking is institutionalized among the academic Left, who are proudof their broad curriculum which includes all sorts of women’s studies, queerstudies, African-American studies, etc. As long as students learn to demand“justice” for everyone, the possibility of revolutionary change can be ignored.Through appeals for justice or equal rights within the system, the academic Leftperpetuates the system and its moralistic logic. And since academia is virtually

defined by the dissociation of thought and action, no revolutionary theory couldpossibly thrive in this context; conversely, it is here that revolutionary ideologyis at home, an object of passive consideration.

The university gives the appearance of fostering learning on one’s own ini-tiative. Indeed, many of the controlling aspects of high school are absent —but only because they are no longer necessary. The university student is self-oppressed, a beautiful example of modern schooling’s hegemony. Her only hopeis to stop identifying with the university and its myths. The student must com-mit the sin of pride (non serviam — I will not serve) just as Stephen Dedalusdid: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself myhome, my fatherland, or my church. . . ”8 Perhaps the student read this in highschool but thought nothing of it. Perhaps, too, they read of the Combine in

Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest but did not recognize the similarityto their teachers. As long as knowledge is looked at from afar as one views theworld of commodities, whatever truths it may reveal remain concealed.

The fact that universities serve the interests of power is all too obvious. AsFredy Perlman observed, students are taught to be innovative when it comes tothe sciences and the physical universe, but their approach must be adaptationistin regard to the social world. Every academic field must be focused towardprogress where it is needed and apologetics when it comes to the effects of suchprogress. Every individual must fit themselves into institutions, jobs, and thewhole social network without ever thinking twice about what is lost. As MichaelB. Katz put it, “We live in an institutional state. Our lives spin outward fromthe hospitals where we are born to the school systems that dominate our youththrough the bureaucracies for which we work and back again to the hospitals in

which we die.”9

The university is a perfect representation of our institutional reality. Theuniversity is an impersonal bureaucracy even when it tries to be somethingelse. Alexis de Tocqueville clearly described the techniques through which suchinstitutions function: “[Administration] covers the surface of society with anetwork of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which themost original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to

7“On the Poverty of Student Life”8James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1992), 268.9Michael B. Katz et al., The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 354.

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rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent,

guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrainedfrom acting; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it doesnot tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till eachnation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industriousanimals, of which government is the shepherd.”10

The university purveys an advanced form of schooling. It is advanced mainlybecause the university is the schooling institution most directly in the serviceof Capital. But haven’t the students had enough of schooling by the time theyget to the university? They are most likely tired of it. It is not easy to haveyour will systematically softened, bent, and guided by authoritarian social struc-tures. Opposition to work itself must now be the basis of any radical oppositionto Capital (which recuperates all forms of partial resistance). Opposition toschooling is now a necessity for those who resist the domestication of capitalist

society. “Schools function as the organization of the passivity of the soul, andthis is true even when active and libertarian methods are used; the liberation of the school would be the liberation of oppression,” wrote Camatte.11 It is all tooapparent that schooling breaks your spirit. And while it is not easy to resist, itis well worth it. Only through resistance to this society can life become worthliving.

10Quoted in Gatto, The Underground History , 91.11Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave and Other Essays (Brooklyn, New York:

Autonomedia, 1995), 109.

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The Anarchist Library

October 17, 2009

Anti-Copyright.http://theanarchistlibrary.org

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